The existing amount of information available over the Internet is staggering. There are an enormous number of web pages that are full of searchable information on almost any topic of interest. Moreover, this amount of information is increasing at a geometric rate. This sheer volume of information has made the search for specific types of information a significant challenge.
A complete field of technology has arisen that focuses upon making it easier for a user to find information available over the Internet. There are a large number of search engines from companies such as Google and Microsoft that permit the user to enter key words or phrases. The search engine then searches the Internet to find web pages that contain the key terms. The results are then presented to the user in some sort of ranked fashion as a flat list. Sometimes a portion of the results is set apart from the rest of the results based on factors such as advertising expenditures, unique grouping of search words, etc. However, given the sheer volume of information available over the Internet, typical search results are so large that it is difficult for a user to find the really relevant web pages or data.
The widespread adoption of the Internet search paradigm for searching on the public Internet has caused an expectation to be able to search for private data within an organization or enterprise with the same degree of ease. Known solutions for searching for enterprise data are typically referred to as “Enterprise Search”, which utilize search or business intelligence mechanisms. Search tends to be focused on the retrieval of a single object. Business intelligence tends to be at high levels of aggregation. Enterprise Search will return results at detailed level across multiple objects. For example, business intelligence might count the number of service requests for a given period and a given product family, whereas Enterprise Search would show details for a number of objects, such as details for all the service requests, e-mail conversations, engineering changes, sales orders, etc.